Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Civilians, Rubyx, Restrictions
Do they have the original Coneheads novels? seattlenerd writes "Largely lost in the TV coverage and media hype surrounding Friday's opening of Paul Allen's Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle is the fact that SFM celebrates books as much as TV/film SF, according to at least one review. Lots of first editions and several manuscripts are on display as the font of SF ideas. Also not covered much: There's no fantasy or horror. It's all science fiction, with no apologies. And ain't it cool that someone has acknowledged that there are actual writers behind some of the best science-fiction depictions? And that some of these writers are on SFM's advisory board?"
(Reader Comte offered a sneak peek at the museum last week.)
That's why it's called software. An anonymous reader writes "News.com.au is reporting an Australian company has released "The Worlds First" anti-virus software for mobile phones to fix the recent 'Caribe' virus and attempts to prevent future exploits."Simon Crean of Mobile security company Jamanda wrote to say that his company is also has "just delivered a comprehensive fix to the widely publicised mobile virus Cabir and made this fix available to the public via its website at www.jamanda.com. As a gesture of goodwill and to maintain market confidence, concerned mobile users can currently download and install this fix at no charge."
Speaking of quick fixes, baudilus writes "The good folks at Cerulean Studios have already released a patch for Trillian, addressing the block attempt by Yahoo!. In half a day they've outdone Yahoo!'s latest scheme. How's that for support?"
Click two ISOs together, go /home. awalrond writes "Rubyx is a source-based Linux distro which achieved far too much interest a couple of months back after a mention on Slashdot. The author had to pull the plug due to the massive bandwidth costs of users downloading all the sources. Well now it's back, fully converted to use the new White Water bandwidth-sharing download utility. A line has been drawn in the sand, and this e-gauntlet thrown back at Slashdot.
Rubyx can be downloaded, built and installed with a single command to the small rubyx script (written in the ruby language) The same script handles all subsequent package management, and can even create a bootable ISO image of the distro."
I want to see the floating candy instead. Mike Taht writes "Bruce Damer, curator of the Digibarn, got some stunning pictures and movies of the historic SpaceShipOne launch event on Monday. Check it out!"Also in civilian space news, Walkiry writes "The Russian Space Comittee has rejected Gregory Olsen, who was set to become the third space tourist, due to health reasons. This comes as a bit of a surprise, given that Olsen himself seemed quite condfident about his performance during the physical training and claimed that the hardest part was actually learning Russian. A real shame."
(The linked story is less clear about whether Olsen will eventually be able to make the trip; in it, a spokesman for Space Adventures denies that this rejection precludes Olsen's flight.)
His meaning is clear. Matheus Villela writes "Sergio Amadeu, Brazilian president of ITI, the third authority in Brazilian government being below only of Brazilian president and the minister of civil house and recently sued by Microsoft have released an official note to Brazilian and international press; here's a translation of what he said:' In atention to the demands of national and international press, which seens solidary with Brazilian Govern at this moment with no precedences in the history, when a controller of an important public institucion of this country personally suffers the action from those interested in mantain a hegeomonic model, i come, after hear my federal lawyers and solicitors, say that the judicial provocation moved against my person is, by itself, so insultant and improper, that does not deserve reply.By reading this far, you irrevocably agree to all the text that follows. emtboy9 writes "If you happen to live in the Raleigh-Durham area, Nextel is now officially offering wireless Broadband via its cell towers. With all the discussion about BPL as of late, its refreshing to finally see someone in my local area doing wireless which is a much better mechanism for broadband access.
For other hand, i would like to register that the act of contract software preserving the values freedom and opening is, for the Brazilian Government, a question of indissolvable form to the democratic principle.
And because a long and painful way was covered to arrive at the current period of stage of development of the democracy in this Country, we will not stop in our fight. If democracy is a value replect of ideology, is not never an insignificant value. If democracy is a dream, is a dream of which this Country never will wake up again.
The future is free.'"
Nextel's coverage area looks to be about the same as the trial area they had been running, but if this takes off, it shouldn't be too much longer until they are offering this coast to coast, especially with coming pressure from Cingular Wireless."
However, be choosy about wireless internet service, which can come with some hidden snags: HEXAN writes "With all the recent hubub over wireless access at broadband speeds, I decided to check out Verizon's plan. Although the price is a bit steep, it seemed ok until I got to the "Terms and Conditions."
Here's a sampling of what you cannot do with Verizon's "unlimited" Internet Access: "...cannot be used for" "uploading, downloading or streaming of movies, music or games" [Ugg], "Web camera posts or broadcasts" [No camgirls], "telemetry applications" [No GPS], "substitute or backup for private lines" [No VOIP]. If I cannot use the service to play games, video conference, make calls, download movies or MP3's, what exactly am I paying for? More importantly, how badly will they impinge on my privacy to enforce this agreement? P.s. You cannot reach that special agreement until you go beyond the "front door". The gotcha clauses are not mentioned in the standard, consumer friendly, litigation-approved agreement."
Later, it will be expanded
Unfortunately, it will most likely follow the course of the Experience Music Project, also an Allen project, and will shrink not expand. In fact, it's in space in the EMP that's not being used due to lack of interest. Hell, several local papers in Seattle ran articles that could have very well been entitled 'What about after all the nerds have come and gone.'
I'm all for Yahoo blocking 3rd party IMs because it would cut down on a lot of spam!
An explanation of WhiteWater from it's creator:
"A Massive increase in internet efficiency is possible with persistent
bandwidth sharing. BitTorrent started the ball rolling; now White Water takes
the next step with proxy/server and mirroring facilities."
Persistent bandwidth sharing is the key. Consider:
- When you download a file with ftp or http, you connect to and download the
WHOLE file from the publishing server.
- When you download a file with bitTorrent, you get CHUNKS of the file from
loads of other people who are downloading the file AT THE SAME TIME AS YOU.
If you are the only downloader, you'll get the WHOLE file from the publishing - When you download with White Water, you get CHUNKS of the file from any WW
proxy which has ever downloaded the file and still has it in it's cache.
White Waters' proxy mode provides this _persistent_ or _ongoing_ file sharing.
Even if you are the only person currently downloading the file, you will
receive chunks from every WW proxy which still has the file (or chunks of it)
in its cache. If there are a hundred proxies with the file, and your local
bandwith is wide enough, you could receive the file 99 times faster than
would be possible from the original publishing server alone, which might be
on a simple home broadband connection.
"Imagine that 10 of your hard working employees download the latest Harry
Potter movie trailer. Thats 10 identical huge files saturating your internet
connection. If instead the trailer was published using WW, you could run a WW
proxy on your gateway server and only 1 copy would be downloaded, even if a
hundred employees decided to fetch it. Better yet, they would all be sharing
the data amongst themselves, massively reducing the load on your gateway
server."
This is only possible with the proxy/server mode WW provides.
"Now imagine that your ISP provided a WW proxy. Thousands of downloads are
reduced to one, freeing up Gigabytes of the ISPs upstream bandwidth!"
As you can see, the implications are quite profound.
"Best of all, JK could publish the trailer on her home broadband connection,
and even a mention on Slashdot couldn't kill it!"
Sounds interesting. If the custom bootable iso creator works as well as it's supposed to it'd be a godsend to those of us who have to put together kiosks vel sim. fairly often.
One complaint though: I wish the author would quit calling it an "operating system" as if it wasn't yet another source-based [Linux | GNU/Linux] distribution. Sure, call it a meta-distribution like Gentoo, but don't get carried away. I'm glad he did so in the writeup; I hope he'll change the webpage too.
One question though: why isn't there a Sourceforge or Rubyforge page for the script? Also, there seems to be a namespace conflict with an in-development Ruby-based Enhydra clone.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
Free, huh?
This is the same country where a NYT reporter was threatened with deportation after he said (backed by sources) that President Lula da Silva was an alcoholic? link
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
A good friend of mine is the product manager for Yahoo Messenger (or one of them). I remember asking him over dinner one time why Yahoo was blocking Trillian, as well as why Yahoo didn't let you create your own IMVironments.
The answer to both were the same: that Yahoo views Messenger and more specifically, the IMVironemnts contained within Messenger as basically a revenue generator and a advertising vehicle to draw traffic to their other properties, not just a text messaging service.
Since Trillian and other alternative clients don't you view the IMVironment ads, they don't want you to use them...
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Are there any photos or videos available from inside the cockpit, or from one of the chase planes? I've been looking all over for them, but to no avail.
80% of yagoo msg usage are the 'bots' on the chat channels which are themselves, unauthorized clients...
how the hell do they manage that?
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Conspicuously missing was Chuck Yeager. Why wasn't he invited!? He's the original badass test pilot!
Depends on if you mean the interpreter and standard libraries or the source code you produce.
For the source code, you can often get quite small while still being readable. Ruby's designer, Matz, takes things like aesthetics, intuitiveness and liveable design more seriously than most language designers. Whether it succeeds or not is a personal judgement call. It leads to some useful things being excluded from the standard base because they are deemed "not the Ruby Way", but also to a tool base that is (in the estimation of fans) very clean, useful and fun to use.
You can read about the ideas behind Ruby here in a presentation by Matz called "How Ruby Sucks". Also an extended Python/Ruby comparison here.
Basically if you want to see what Perl would look like if it was created by a crazy Japanese guy with a peculiar philosophy of programming instead of a crazy American guy with a peculiar philosophy of programming, take a look at Ruby.
Google confirms: Ruby is the world's most beloved programm
Does this mean you can't use this for a remote desktop connection or to ssh into your server?
I think it clearly says "This is how we're going to structure an incredibly misleading add compaign". It's an attempt to sell an 'unlimited' service with a contract giving them the right to restrict said service in pretty much any way they want. Nothing more, nothing less.
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
IIRC, quite a big fraction of Perl's bulk is due to its extensive facilities for handling unicode (UTF-8). The lack of simple, automatic, thoroughly integrated unicode support is actually one of the reasons I've never wanted to do much with Ruby, even though it seems like compared to Perl it's a nicer language qua language.
Find free books.
I didn't want this to devolve into a religious freedom argument, but rather point out important differences in attitudes regarding freedom between Brazil and the USA.
In Brazil, Catholcism is a very dominant force, and in just about every public building you will find a picture of the Pope, even police stations and DMV bureaus. I am not talking about one on the desk of one of the employees or officers, but one in a very prominent place in very plain view, with generally nothing else around it. Kinda like having a U.S. flag or a picture of the current President of the USA (or governor of the respective state in state offices), but even more likely to be found than those symbols are in the U.S. Of course the most bizzare was finding a huge picture of JFK where the Pope would normally be found, but that is another story. And that was in the late 1980's.
The Roman Catholic Church isn't quite as dominant as it once was, and if I'm not mistaken, a majority of Sao Paulo (meaning just slightly larger than 50%) is now protestant, primarily a mixture of hard-core evangelical churches (Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses, Baptists, Penecostal, and a few home-grown Christian-based religions unique to Brazil like the Brazilian Catholic Church (not Roman Catholic). Sao Paulo is also unique in that there is also a rather large minority that is Buddahist, something you normally don't find in the USA or anywhere else in the Americas for that matter. In some ways this Buddahism has entered the culture, together with a history of fighting Portuguese bureaucracy that can only be experienced to be fully appreciated. Rio was the capital of Portugual for about 20 years (no kidding), and that heritage of being a European(???) capital has never left that city either.
It is also telling how Brazil "fought" their war of indendance: The Prince-Regent (kinda like the Prince of Wales in England, but this was a Portuguese Prince) was called back to Europe and to put his deputy in charge of Brazil. He threw down his coat and proclaimed that Brazil was no longer under the authority of Portugual. Some people around him proclaimed him to be the new "Emperor" of Brazil, a few shots from rifles were fired into the air, and the Revolution was over. Quite a bit different from what Washington had to go through.
Getting back to public discussions of religion: It is indeed sad that religion as a topic can't be discussed publicly. It is a part of life and even if you belive or not, others do have religion as a central part of their lives. If you want to understand what makes people tick, you need to understand at least what viewpoint a religious attitude does to change people's perspectives about many topics. To ignore this or to "compartmentalize" religion to be only discussed in churches doesn't allow this topic to be explored even by people who have other beliefs.
When a candidate for political office who ignores religion suddenly finds him/herself losing and election, they should realize that religion is a big deal.
I could enumerate specific examples of where my speech has been stopped and surpressed due to talking about religion. Not preaching a specific religion but discussing the impact of religious thought in an historical context or even suggesting that people who lived 100-200 years ago had religious motivations to many of the things they did, including religious repression. I was encouraged to pretend that religion never played a part in the history of the USA. That is a hard pill for me to swallow.
Athiests have no problem with the pledge. Well, at least not in its original form. We like the pledge because we enjoy that same feeling of nationalism that you do.
:). I do agree with you that the only place to discuss religion without fear of being disagreed with is when you are with your peers, but that isn't really saying much.
:o)
There is only this one little thing wrong with it. During the red scare, the words "under God" were added as in insult to the communist(!) athiests.
And yes, it is an insult to athiests. Imagine some people in government had thought it would be nice to add the words "under no God" 50 years ago, just to alienate people like you that believe in a God.
I wouldn't like that either.
On the other hand, had the words "under God" been a part of the original pledge, and were simply an expression of one man's faith, it would not be an insult to athiests. God bless America is an example of a nice song that few people object to.
It's that simple.
Do people care about the "in God we trust" on our money? I don't think so. It's my impression that that is just an exaggeration used as an argument against getting rid of "under God" from the pledge. (Give them an inch, and they'll be asking us to get rid of every reference to God!) It's just not as much of an issue. People find something wrong with everything, and the "In God We Trust" just seems to be at the same level as background noise.
Look, all I'm saying is that you religious people are not mindless sheep. I consider athiesm a religion, so you be sure that I mean that. I understand that people like to wear their religion on their sleeve (I do!), and that is all I consider "In God We Trust" and "God Bless America" to be.
But please don't use your majority power to insult people like me. That's just wrong no matter what religion you believe in.
Also,
I also have to disagree with your position that because of the religious (or lack thereof) climate in the US, people are more likely to disagree with you or call you stupid, etc. when you discuss religion. For every Christian that is afraid of admitting they go to church, there is an Athiest that is afraid of admitting that they don't go to church. Religion has always been a subject of much disagreement well before there was a US of A. People from all ages, from the distant past to the present have disagreed so much that they have/are committed genocide against those that they disagreed with. It is not a modern "push" as you called it, but a universal constant. You have to expect disagreement when you discuss religion, because none of it is based on irrefutable fact (yes, even athiesm
Well there you go. I welcome your (offtopic) comments